Community Solutions: KC gun violence victims looking for change
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The many faces of people affected by gun violence in Kansas City includes Omaha resident Nnenna Holbert. Someone shot and killed her cousin Julius Harris on 71 Highway in 202.
Seven years later, Kansas City leaders are looking to her hometown to make sure similar incidents happen less.
“That’s a good feeling because we don’t know who did it because it’s an unsolved murder,” Holbert said.
“No one expects a tragedy like what occurred in my family a couple months ago to happen,” said Beto Lopez. His sister, Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was shot and killed after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally. “We know it happens across society, across this country.”
Community Solutions: Importing success to Kansas City from Omaha
Lopez’s family was shoved onto the national stage in February but he was part of KC Common Good long before that day, driving home a tragic irony that people and their families can become the victims of the very problems they’re trying to solve.
“We have a lot of great initiatives a lot of great organizations in Kansas City, but I don’t think we’re as organized and strategic as they are here in Omaha,” Lopez said.
That’s a big problem that KC Common Good and KC 360 Founder Klassie Alcine is working on.
“I think in Kansas City we have a lot of plans but there’s usually no funding attached to it,” Alcine said.
Lopez and Alcine were in Omaha in April learning about the Empowerment Network and Omaha 360, which is the initiative the addresses the underlying causes of violence and crime to stop it before it starts.
It’s been around for 17 years and takes millions of dollars from public, private, business, and philanthropic sources every year to fund a wide variety of programs. That’s why the Founder Willie Barney is optimistic about where KC 360 is two years after it launched.
“Kansas City is further along because you have stakeholders from all different sectors that are coming into the room,” Barney said.
Already, Barney points out, Kansas City has philanthropic organizations, elected leaders, and business leaders supporting the cause.
“KC 360 really gives us that opportunity to really get at the root causes of our violence,” said Kansas City Councilmember Crispin Rea, who went on the trip to Omaha.
Business leaders like Kansas City Chamber of Commerce President Joe Reardon are on the KC Common Good Board.
Community Solutions: Building trust, buy-in takes time
“It is about small wins to begin with,” Reardon said. “Singles and doubles and that sort of thing but you have to have the planning and the alignment to get to the big.”
Those small wins can be the proof that the business community needs to help fund KC 360 initiatives or get involved by offering jobs and training, creating better opportunities in neighborhoods that have historically been left out.
“Once those relationships are formed around a strategy and an execution, I think you see the investment come behind that,” Reardon said.
That’s important because big investments are needed to make the initiative work. Already there have been $3.5 million invested in the Santa Fe Neighborhood over two years in Kansas City for community clean ups, neighborhood canvassing, and conflict resolution training. The goal is to scale up similar programs in other parts of the city.
Alcine says steep price tags are the price of not doing this kind of work for generations.
“If you have blighted areas that have been blighted for decades, we’re going to have to invest to make up for the decades lost of investment,” Alcine said.
KC Common Good and KC 360 is finalizing a 10-point plan to help prioritize its work. At the same time, other violence prevention work continues around the community with some grant money available from Kansas City.
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UMKC Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice Dr. Marijana Kotlaja is getting some money from the city to collect data about what crime is happening, where it’s occurring, what organizations and services are available, and if they’re having an impact.
“We have a vortex of crime in Kansas City,” Kotlaja said. “It runs down the Paseo corridor. We know that vortex is kind of like a vortex where all of our crime clusters, we can see what are the services? Do we have enough services going on in these communities?”
Her group of researchers will eventually have a public-facing site that will let people explore the data they’ve collected and could help inform where investment happens.
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“That allows you to more effectively address violence and be able to intervene with better mechanisms and do it in a way that’s cost-effective for taxpayers,” Kotlaja said. “Because you can have programs running in the city that we now are evidence based and are going to consistently show positive results.”
